Femicide in Baja.

*Trigger Warning*
If you know anything about femicide in Mexico, then you already know it is an epidemic of gross proportions. The mutilation, rape and murder of women along the US/Mexico border has become an annual statistic, with little mainstream media coverage and even less national outcry. And the worse part of it is that many of these disappearances are not even investigated, they literally disappear, vanish and are wiped from legibility.
From a piece written in 2004 in Off Our Backs Corie Osborn writes,

For the past decade, a sexual genocide has raged virtually unnoticed in Juarez, the largest city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Approximately 370 women have been found murdered in the State of Chihuahua over the past decade, according to an Amnesty International report published last August. At least 137 women were sexually assaulted prior to their death.
The majority of these murders occurred in and around Ciudad Jurez; however, in the past three years incidences of murder and disappearances have risen in the nearby state capital Ciudad Chihuahua.
Many of the violent murders that have taken place in Juarez follow a similar pattern. Authorities believe that 93 of the victims fit the same rape-murder pattern, which indicates that they are all the work of a serial killer or killers.
Why has a killer who has murdered more than twice the number of people as the Boston Strangler, Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy combined, been able to continue terrorizing Ciudad Juarez for ten years with only vague interest from the international community or even from the Mexican federal government? And who is responsible for the killings of the other hundreds of women found dead in Juarez over the past decade?
Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are veiled by the power of a dominant machismo culture and what appears to be a police conspiracy preventing a thorough investigation of the murders.

Two years ago the documentary On the Edge: Femicide in Cuidad Juarez took on the horrific examples and sheer numbers of women disappearing in Juarez. The whole thing is up on youtube (in ten parts) and I strongly recommend watching it.
Here is the first part.

I bring this up today is because it was released yesterday that this epidemic hasn’t stopped and that the disappearance of women in the Baja peninsula outnumber those disappeared in Chihuahua.

In Mexicali and other parts of Baja California, women’s murders tend to get “buried” in the avalanche of news about violent crime, which includes hundreds of slayings, numerous kidnappings and street-side shoot outs since last year alone. While femicides in Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua garnered international headlines in recent years, little international attention was paid to women’s murders in Baja California.
A report issued earlier this year by the femicide commission of the lower house of the Mexican Congress, found 105 women were murdered in Baja California during 2006-2007. Using official numbers, more women were murdered in Baja California than in Chihuahua (84 female murder victims) during the same comparable period.
In 2006-07 Baja California ranked eighth place nationally for women’s homicides, falling slightly behind Mexican states with much larger populations including Jalisco, Veracruz and Puebla, according to the Mexican Congressional report.

This epidemic shows us that women’s bodies are considered expendable and between patterns of globalization and a corrupt government the bodies of young women are not important and not worth investigating.